The general, the hostess, the director and his lover: Petraeus adds farce to the Benghazi tragedy

It’s bad enough that America has a president who doesn’t know his “act of terror” from his elbow, but the Petraeus scandal adds a dash of farce to the Benghazi tragedy. Blogger RS McCain has sourced this fun summary of the scandal, which began when the lover of the former Director of the CIA first started sending anonymous and ominous emails to a woman that she suspected of moving in on her man…

Jill Kelley, the woman who was (allegedly) threatened by Gen. Petraeus’s squeeze Paula Broadwell and who (apparently) started the FBI investigation that led to Petraeus’ ouster, who went to the FBI for help after the threats and then (allegedly) had a relationship with the FBI agent in charge of her own case, who (allegedly) sent her shirtless pics of himself, also (apparently, allegedly) had “compromising” communications with Gen. John Allen, the Big Damn Commander of our war effort in Afghanistan … It’s not a love triangle. It’s a love Pentagon.

Indeed, it's all very swinging. One of the commentators on McCain’s blog appends this honest, if rather tangential, insight: “I'm a former Swinger. It's a great lifestyle. Though, hard to keep up.” Amen, brother.

How does this comedy relate to the horror of Benghazi, when four American citizens were killed at the tail end of what increasingly looks like an intelligence operation gone bad? It testifies to the extraordinary incompetence at all levels of the federal security state. There was the affair itself between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell (a mother of two), which screams “potential for blackmail.” The well toned two shared an obsession with “fitness and the study of leadership” and they communicated through emails stored in draft folders – a method “often used by terrorists” and lovesick teens. Broadwell apparently got jealous of party hostess Ms Kelley and started harassing her, which is when the FBI was called in. The FBI took a bizarrely long time to piece things together while rummaging around in private email accounts. The FBI is also now looking at "potentially inappropriate" correspondence between Kelley and US Marine Corps General John R Allen. There's 20,000 to 30,000 pages to work through, which hints at an "inappropriate" relationship of Tolstoyan proportions.

Lots of questions occur. Did the CIA know about the FBI investigation and why didn’t it intervene? If the FBI knew about the affair, did it tell Attorney General Eric Holder? If Eric Holder knew, did he tell the President? If the White House was kept in the dark, then it was shielded from a potential security risk. Indeed some are asking if Petraeus passed on classified information to his lover. And why wasn’t it until after the election that the public discovered what was going on?

Petraeus’ fall from grace looks innocent as much as adultery can be innocent. But its proximity to the Benghazi disaster makes it a lot more important. A question still lingers as to why the former CIA Director gave a brief to the House Intelligence Committee that contradicted his own agency's reports about what happened in Libya. Victoria Toensing of Fox News writes,

For some reason DCI Petraeus backed the Obama unsupported theory that the video made the attackers do it rather than his own Chief of Station’s assessment that it was a planned military attack. Why do the shifting stories and misplaced theory of cause matter? Because if an administration pushes a political agenda that applauds the killing of Bin Laden as the ultimate act for eradicating the radical Islamic threat, then that same administration ignores its Ambassador’s urgent pleas for more security for fear it will appear Bin Laden’s demise was not the answer to that threat. Our country’s chief spy is supposed to know which theory is held up by the evidence.

All speculation, but the Petraeus affair compounds this mystery with another. If the FBI knew that the Director was a security risk, why didn’t it obey the law and inform the Intelligence Committees and the White House? Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. The mystery deepens.

PS

Careful who you link to. Tom Doran at HuffPo/IndyVoices points out to me that RS McCain has a "colourful" history as a writer that includes associations with neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis (why must everything with a "neo" in it almost always be wrong?). I obviously did not know and I obviously disassociate myself from such opinions.